When entrepreneurs get stood up

What's the first roadblock to a new business?

A revenue model? No.

Customer analysis? No.

Seed funding. Not always.

Setting up the right team? Bingo!

So after quitting the high profile Big 4 consulting job, where I was used to interviewing candidates who were dying to work for the firm, I realised how frustrating interviewing can be when you're small fish. Of course, I had expected people to be partially interested in the job profile or haggling for better packages. But I had never, ever expected to get stood up.

Over and over and over again, I found myself sitting in the local CCD, waiting endlessly as one candidate after another chose not to show up and refuse to take my calls. It was weird because when we spoke the night before to fix an appointment, they all sounded really excited to join a startup. What changed in that one night, I'll never know.

Or will I? Because I'm a data driven person, I have an excel sheet of all candidates I've ever shortlisted, along with a history of events (remnants of the consulting phase of my life). This is the right time for me to say that if I ever planned my revenge, beware you guys! Okay, okay, I digress...and sound too much like the movies I watch. What I found in this data was that every single candidate who stood me up was female! Every. Single. One.

Were women more prone to standing employers up? As a woman, I didn’t like the idea of that, but the data driven me couldn’t shut out the possibility. Or was it that women did a lot more research than men before a job interview and were deciding my fledgling startup was not worth it? A friend even suggested that maybe male candidates would have stood me up too, but didn’t because they were curious about being interviewed by a woman!

Whatever the case, this has got me thinking. With everything being rated and reviewed in today’s world, why can’t candidate professionalism too? Candidates who block your time by confirming their presence and then don’t bother turning up (or informing, or picking up your calls, or responding to emails) should face the consequences of their actions. None of the leading job portals online have the facility to tag a candidate as an absconder.

As an entrepreneur who doesn’t have an HR team doing the groundwork for me, I’d sure love to know the standing up history of a candidate. In fact, I’m sure recruitment companies would love to use this as a shortlisting method too. Where’s the next tech company telling you to “get your interview professionalism score here” to bag the next big job?

Go make that app! That’s my free advice to budding entrepreneurs for the next big business idea. Now all you need to do is get the right team…